


LD50 (Somewhere Only We Belong)

by WitchyDarling



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Post Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-26
Updated: 2012-03-26
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:20:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WitchyDarling/pseuds/WitchyDarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's after they've won, after they've moved on, after they've all gone their separate ways. Dave and Terezi stuck together, and they realize that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't have. But it's hard to abandon something you've loved for so long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	LD50 (Somewhere Only We Belong)

She makes you see red. Normally that’d be funny, and normally you could deal with it, but you are so, so tired of drowning your vision with Wild Cherry Blast, or whatever the hell she’s calling it.

She’s so pretty, unconventionally and unwittingly so, and her form is so familiar to your scarlet stained eyes that it hurts. Small breasts, a bony ass, ribs like razors, knock-kneed and naughty minded with a tongue that might be longer than Gene Simmons’. She’s tiny, she’s overpowering, she’s blind, she’s clairvoyant, she’s a whole lot of anomalies and enigmas all balled up by some uncaring hand and thrown at a mirror. Her mind is as sharp as her teeth, sharp as a palmful of broken glass thrown out the window and left glittering on the pavement to be picked up by some unsuspecting child. Being with her is like wandering around some ridiculous funhouse day after day, running into your reflection as her laughter echoes all around you.

You’re kind of sick of it. More than, actually. The bickering was fun at first because it felt like you agreed on some things, or at least could flirt while you disagreed. But it’s been a few years, and you’ve both gotten older but it feels like your relationship hasn’t. It’s stale, like the recycled air that you were stuck breathing on that damned meteor for so long. Now it’s all routine, and you’ve got fighting down scarily close to a science, the swing-dodge-parry rhythm pulsing in your boiling red blood.

“What’re you thinking, Cool Kid?” and she says the nickname somewhat grudgingly, like it’s trying to stick her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

She’s on the tiny couch of your living room. Her knobby knees are curled up to her chest and splotched teal with bruises that might be from her or may be from you, you don’t know. The TV is on, but it’s just a snowy screen. You hate this about her, too, but she says she likes the noise, she says it tastes like crisp rice cakes left to burn but you can’t even be bothered anymore to care about the ravings of a synesthetic. You remember when you first met her and you wanted to ask what everything tasted like, smelled like, but the thought of such memories is like a rusty fork twisting around your intestines like so much spaghetti, so you quickly forget again.

You don’t say anything in response to her question, because she knows, and you know she knows, and she knows you know she knows, and so on. It’s a game, or it would be if it didn’t make you as tired as everything else did. You wonder briefly if maybe it’s something wrong with you, but the wicked scars of retaliation on your arm say otherwise, and maybe the problem is you’ve been stuck together so long that what was once bright cherry red is now a festering into a purely pestilent black. Lack of oxygen darkens the blood, after all, and you certainly feel like you can’t breathe.

Maybe it would make Crab Boy happy, at least. You don’t know anymore; you haven’t really talked to the rest of them in a long, long time.

“Well?” Her voice is so pretty, not like bells or something stupid, but like claws against a blackboard, in the most musical way possible. It’s a rasp left from sucking most of the poison out of your soul for you, and if she talks too long it grates on everyone’s ears but yours. You don’t mind, not now, not ever. The first time you heard it you could only think of all the sick beats you could remix it into.

“Three guesses.” This, too, is a game, one that she’s more irritated by than you are. You do it for irony’s sake, though you’re not sure you can even tell it from sincerity anymore; the lines are blurred like the colors on her computer screen.

Her head rolls to one side, and she blinks, frowns, lips curling up to reveal the fangs you are far too familiar with. You pad into the kitchenette, nearly tripping over the various junk littering the floor - her scalemates made an impressive addition to the puppets you inherited from your Bro - and grab a relatively clean looking mug from the sink.

“You’ve come up with a way to banish all the uncool people to their own island so the rest of us can live in peace.” Her voice floats around the corner and over the counter, the snark in it making it sound like a little extra pressure has been added to the nails on that board.

“Nah,” you reply, talking to the infuriatingly empty coffee pot that is staring you in the face. She always neglects to refill it, or turn it on, or something. It’s like she’s trying to deprive you of your caffeine. “That’d mean exiling Egbert, and I couldn’t do that, now could I? The Prince of Cool has to be fuckin’ compassionate towards his subjects, because he knows they can never get on his level.”

There’s a murmur of assent in the next room, along with the plastic squeal of another Cheetos bag being torn open. She loves Cheetos. You don’t understand why, because the things are basically toxic, but she says the atomic orange powder is the best part. All you know is it gets everywhere, and Cheeto-prints on your shades are definitely way high up on the list of things you’re tired of.

“You’re thinking of some seriously strict beats, aren’t you?” she asks as you re-enter the living room and crash warily into the solitary chair.

“No,” you snap, “I haven’t been coming up with things lately, you know that. My genius has left the building. Go check downstairs; it signed its name on the sign-out sheet weeks ago. It’s written in blood and everything.”

She just grins at you, that unfathomable, shark-toothed grin that kind of makes you want to knock every single one of those pointy fuckers right out of her mouth. You would, too, if you weren’t so chill all the fucking time. It’s not the same as it used to be, not at all, because she was never about mirth in the old days. Everything was justice and nothing hurt, unless it did, because there’re things even a high-powered legislacerator can’t fix.

You grab the remote to change the channel to something other than this goddamned snow, and her smile slips away.

She throws a Cheeto at you.

“Quit,” you sigh.

Another comes flying and sticks in your hair. You brush it away. “I said stop, dude.”

She giggles, and it’s a dry little noise, one step up from wheezing. You glance over at her, in her red striped tube socks and blue and white panties and your shrunken shirt, tucked up against the other end of the couch, snickering maliciously as she barricades herself with her odd alien legs.

And a third Cheeto comes flying. You grit your teeth. “Quit it, Scourge,” you say threateningly, unable to control yourself and the poison that just won’t quit oozing out from between your teeth.

She deflates like a popped balloon, brows drawing down parallel to her conical horns. “Well aren’t you all sunshine and rainbows, Cool Kid.” There it is again, the gummy stickiness like she has to force herself to say it. It used to be such an endearment, too.

She gets up and you both know what’s coming next. It’s more of the same routine. Your lives are just a play that’s been rewritten for each new setting, every reprise smacking of déjà vu, and that might be the most tiring part of all. You can’t be bothered to even get up from where you’re slouched.

She clambers atop you and wraps her hands around your throat, and you can’t tell if the threat is empty this time. “You are so selfish,” she hisses, sounding like an angry lizard, “you really, really are.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought they mentioned that in the owner’s manual. You could probably return me for a refund, if you want.”

“Stop that!” Her voice has risen to a bark, scraping against your eardrums. “I’m sick of it, sick to death, and maybe if it weren’t such a depressing thing to consider I’d just go throw myself out the window of this festering apartment. Maybe if you all didn’t need me so much to hold yourselves together.” She still talks to her friends, still holds the group in something at least resembling a whole.

“That’s rich,” you snort. “Since when were you the friendleader?”

“Since Karkat falls apart every time anything of remote consequence happens,” she snarls. It’s always about Karkat. You can’t tell if you should be jealous or not. “Since he turned into a wriggling mound of grubguts and flaccid bonebulges, since we were wigglers, since ever!” Her fingers tighten around your neck and suddenly you are once again uncomfortably familiar with the longing for even the stale air of the old meteor, for anything other than her desperation snaking down your throat. Her own breath hitches. “And I. Am not. Your friend.”

You don’t say anything because you can’t, because even if she wasn’t strangling you - why must this be her preferred method of killing? - you couldn’t think of anything to say, really. You cringe behind your shades when you realize there will probably be atomic orange smears left all over your neck, just another bit of her handiwork to compliment the deep purple bruises.

“What happened?” A pale teal tear drips down her pointed nose. “I pitied you so much it hurt. It burned through me. You know that! I wanted to dismember you and keep your little pieces safe forever, cut your bloodpusher out and carry it in my pocket because I felt like it would fall apart if it were anywhere else.” It still confuses you that this, this is supposed to be love. “I dreamed of making jewelry with your teeth.”

Your eyesight is starting to waver and your hearing has gotten fuzzy. A pathetic noise escapes unbidden from your mouth, and you’re suddenly, incomprehensibly, predictably as angry as she is, a hot red blaze roaring up your esophagus to match the driftwood blue of hers. It’s been a while since you spit fire, and your tongue, though it is lying heavy and dry in your mouth, is longing for the feeling. You know this is a different kind of flame, though.

She isn’t expecting your elbow in chest, even though she should be, and flies off of you, tumbling to the floor with an animal yowl. Your lungs decree their first order of business to be flying wide open and sucking in as much air as they can hold, so much that you hiccup and choke on it again, and it’s pretty damn humiliating, but you don’t care, you really don’t.

“Just lay off, will you?” you grind out when you think you can manage it, but she’s already jumped up and has hurled herself at you, all fangs and claws and gray velvet, black silk, a beautiful wild monster. Suddenly you’re the one on the floor with the coherence knocked clear out your head.

“Lay off?” she shrieks. “Lay off? This is not me. This is you, this is what you’re doing, this is your fault.”

“Objection,” you mutter. “You of all people should know not to play the blame-game. This court finds you guilty of witness slandering, Miss Redglare.”

Her eyes blaze. “Shut up. I’m done. Don’t even play with me right now, Strider.”

You shrug as best you can. So tired, so tired… and something hurts, something is aching and bleeding deep inside of you. Her knees are cutting into your stomach, and it’s obnoxious but you don’t care because you’re damn well used to it, it’s like that’s where they belong now.

You lie there, pinned on your back, and she trembles and shakes above you, full to overflowing with frustration and rage and disgust. It’s too much, and suddenly her face twists into something pained, something that matches the growing feeling in your gut.

“You know,” she says, snuffling, scripted, verbatim, “maybe we should just stop. We’re trying so hard, Dave, don’t you see? And maybe if things were different… I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t. I can’t deal with you. I wish I could; do you know how much? But it feels like you don’t even try to make it easy.”

The surrender feels like a threat, and you are awash with mixed feelings. Here comes the rusty fork again, bidden by her words, and you’re not much more than a big plate of Strider pasta trapped and wriggling beneath its tines.

“Maybe we should just stick to our own lives for a while,” she says, one sharp tooth worrying at her inky dark lip until it bleeds.

There. The dam has broken. You’ve been denying it - and what Strider wouldn’t? - as you do regularly, but you don’t know if you can handle being without this girl who pulses like your own flesh and blood any more than you can handle being with her. You couldn’t walk around like this, waiting for her fingers to fade from your throat, waiting for the impression she’s left to just erode away.

It takes so much effort - so much, you didn’t know one movement could - but you raise your head and press your lips to hers and she whimpers in that way that tears you apart and stitches you right back up. Kissing her is the same as it always was; that might be the one thing that hasn’t changed a bit, like the burst of a supernova in your chest, and Jesus H. Christ you didn’t figure you could feel this strongly about anything. How unlike you, how wonderfully humiliating. 

Her head falls to your chest and it feels like she’s going to shake her bones apart. You hold her until she stops, and she whispers, very softly, “I think we’ve got cabin fever. We’re going stir-crazy together.” 

“If anyone would know, you would,” you say blandly. “I’m just the guy with the sick beats and the shitty sword. Time shenanigans all up in here.” It’s true, though; you’ve hardly been out for a while, because where is there to go when what’s left of your ragtag band is scattered like stars across a foreign planet?

And this is exactly how it happened the last time, this is exactly how it’s going to go next time, but you don’t care because you’d keep doing this the rest of your life if it meant you could keep her. For all you know you’ve been living this one day over and over, stuck in a paradox slipstream, but you don’t really care, because you’re living it with her. Maybe you don’t want to cut her head off, and maybe that makes you the weird one in the relationship - it’s hard to tell when neither of you even belong to an extant race anymore. But you adore her so, you adore her still, even through all of this, because who else can fit so perfectly into every empty angle of your life and carve out new ones with so little effort? She may be the death of you someday, and hell, she already has been once, but you’re okay with that, you think. You’ve straight up lost yourself in this paradise of plush toys and blackrom-flushcrush madness, and you’re okay with that, too. It’s a maze that only she knows the way out of, and she’s just leading you deeper and deeper into it, mirror by mirror, day by day.

“I’m hungry,” she mumbles into your shirt.

“Me, too,” you say, and push her off of you. “Into the kitchen with you; I want a sandwich.”

She whines and bitches and complains and comes up with a thousand different logical arguments against you, most of which make no sense because you never managed to wrap your head around her lawbook. But you laugh and sit up, then stand, your legs feeling solid underneath you as you pull her up to join you so you can forage together in the apocalyptic wasteland that is your kitchen.

Another day, come and gone. Same old, same old; before you know it, you might just find yourself somewhere new.

**Author's Note:**

> The title, LD50, comes from a toxicological term. LD50 is defined as a lethal dose of poison, or the amount that will kill 50% of a given population.  
> 


End file.
